Lent 24 post 11

 Psalm 88

As if the Teacher wasn’t depressing enough yesterday, here I go again, dampening the blog with possibly the most dark and dreary chapter in the Bible. Why? Because we need to grapple with realities. Lent is the time for preparing for Easter, the greatest reality in history, in which God defeated what we might call the greatest ‘anti-reality' in history, death.

Living death?

Like Ecclesiastes, Heman the Ezrahite who wrote this song (if it can be called that) is brutally honest about the reality of what he’s going through. It feels to him like a living death. For death is not just something that happens when you die, is it? There are experiences in life that are deathly in a wider sense. Things that suck the life out of you. Things that crush all the joy of living. Things that make you feel you might as well be dead.

Like depression, for instance. I mean the clinical illness of depression (not just occasionally feeling a bit down in the dumps). And that might be the case for you. I don’t know,  of course, but many of us have a friend or a family member suffering from depression. They tell me that, in its worst depths, depression turns life itself to dust. They say that the lowest pit and the lonely darkness of Psalm 88.6 & 18 tell it like it is for them. This psalm speaks to them and for them. 

‘Darkness is my closest friend’

Psalm 88’s closing words blew me away. Here is no hope,  there seems no faith. It is almost blasphemous, God is meant to be so good that he is our utterly dependable friend. But to claim that ‘darkness is my closest friend’ is to appear to reject God. At the very least, it illustrates a lost confidence in him.

So here is the final paradox. Heman the Ezrahite expresses in prayer to God what it feels like to have no God at all. He prays in despair and because of his despair. Even though that seems like the last thing one should do if there is no God at work. So, to my mind, Psalm 88 is unexpectedly one of the Bible’s most liberating chapters. 

(Mark Meynell, When Darkness Seems My Closest Friend,  p37)

Liberating?

Really? Yes, because of the sheer amazement that such a psalm should be in our Bible at all, that God would allow it to be there. The psalmist knows that God does hear his cry from the depths, even if a big part of his pain is that it feels as if God isn’t listening. And in his opening line, the psalmist still trusts in God’s salvation, even in his desperation and longing and waiting. The emotions are raw and real, he feels close to the pit of death (.1-6), he feels guilty and under God’s wrath (.7, 16), he wants to praise God for his wonders, love, faithfulness and righteous acts, but there’ll not be much chance of doing that in the grave (.10-12), he feels utterly rejected in spite of daily prayer (.13-14), and this seems the story of his whole life (.15-18). Is it not liberating to know that the Bible itself gives you freedom to talk that way, to give voice to such terrible words, if it’s the honest truth about how you feel?

On the lips of Jesus?

I wonder if it’s liberating in another way also. Can we imagine a psalm like this giving expression to the depth of suffering that Jesus endured for us, as he went through the agony of facing death and separation from his Father? We know for certain that Psalm 22 expressed his suffering, since he quoted it. And probably Psalm 69 would have had deep meaning for him too. Try reading Psalm 88 again through the mind and lips of Jesus, and thank God that, if the psalm now or ever expresses your own experience, Jesus has been there too, and has won the victory over such life-invading deathliness.